FontCreator 10.1 added a new option to use Alternate or Winding fill in Tools, Options, General. Glyph Outline Fill Mode.

I just came across a bug in one of my fonts that I might have spotted sooner if I had not enabled the Alternate Fill mode. There are pros and cons of each fill mode. Using the Font Validator or Validation Toolbar will catch this kind of error, but I did not use either in this case.

The white outline of the contours with incorrect direction that you see in Alternate Winding Mode in FontCreator do not show up in an exported font.

Now that one can add loads of kerning pairs by using kerning classes and autokern, fonts tend to get bloated with a lot of pairs that are too small to be worth keeping. For a standard font with 2048 funits per em, a kerning value of less than 10 or 20 is barely noticeable. Fortunately, the OpenType Designer has a way of removing these small values quickly.

Run Autokern

Manually check for positive values. There's no reason not to use positive kerning, but they are often an indicator that side-bearings need some attention.

Fix the side-bearings then run Autokern again.

Export the OpenType Layout Definition script from the OpenType Designer to preserve all of the kerning classes and kerning pairs.

Optionally, remove any unused classes from the Class Manager

Right-click on the Pair Adjustment lookup, and select Trim

Select the value that you want to trim. Both positive and negative values. Values equal to or greater than the chosen value will not be trimmed.

Accents should be designed in the correct vertical position for lowercase glyphs. When the Complete Composites feature is used, they are raised for Uppercase glyphs by the distance between x-height and CapsHeight.

Accents for Small Capital glyphs are centred vertically on the CapHeight. To adjust the vertical position of accents for Capitals or Small Capitals, temporarily edit the CapHeight in font properties. One can use the Calculate button to reset it to what it should be after using Complete Composites.

In this screen shot I have manually changed the CapHeight from 1493 funits to 1550 funits to raise them by 57 funits over Small Capitals glyphs.

Complete Composites will align accents correctly for most glyphs, but some glyphs have an optical centre that is different to the geometric centre, and all glyphs should be checked visually for the best results.

Adding a Diagonal Guideline for an Italic Font

Diagonal Guideline.png (29.82 KiB) Viewed 4712 times

Drag a guide out from the ruler

Holding down the Shift key while dragging the placed guide to rotate it

Drag the guide to position it to the optical centre of the current glyph

Move the accent using the cursor keys + Shift or Ctrl to centre it on the guideline. Acute accents should be 1/3 to the left and 2/3 to the right of the guide. Grave accents should be 2/3 to the left and 1/3 to the right of the guide.

I am currently working on a set of eight font styles and wanted to check several glyphs across all ten type styles. Currently, tags cannot be copied from one project to another. Here is a method to work around this using the Glyph Transform wizard.

Selecting the Glyphs in one font for Tagging

Scroll through the entire font adding glyphs that need attention to the Preview Toolbar using the shortcut Shift P.

Copy the glyph names from the bottom of the Preview Toolbar, using End, Shift + Home, Ctrl C

Select Glyph Names for Copying.png (8.71 KiB) Viewed 4695 times

Paste into notepad, and replace / with a space

Open the Glyph Transform Wizard from the Tools menu and add the feature "Override Range by Glyph Name(s)" to the script

Paste the glyph names from notepad into the list of glyph names

Save the script, and then run it.

Select Narrow Glyphs.png (18.36 KiB) Viewed 4700 times

Tagging the Glyphs
All of the named glyphs will now be selected. Use the Ctrl 1 shortcut to tag the glyphs as "ToDo" (or use any of the other four tags).

The script can then be run to quickly tag the same glyphs in other typeface styles or fonts.

Tagging More than 256 Glyphs

The number of glyphs that can be added to the Preview Toolbar is limited to 256 at a time. However, there is no obvious limit to the number of glyph names that can be added to the "Override Range by Glyph Name(s)" feature. I tag over a thousand glyphs in my large fonts for exclusion from the Web and WOFF versions. Now that I have saved a transform script for tagging glyphs I can easily edit the list, or tag another font or type style in the same way.

It can take a few minutes to autokern a large font. Here's a way to speed up the process.

Add a new pair adjustment lookup

Add just a few kerning pairs to the lookup

Run Autokern with different glyph spacing values until you are happy with the result

Run Autokern on the full pair adjustment lookup that the kerning feature uses

Kerning pairs can be copied from the “PairAdjustmentTest” lookup table to the “PairAdjustmentLatin” (or whatever you have named it) lookup using the Code Editor (use the button at the bottom of the OpenType Designer dialogue, not the icon at the top, which only edits the current lookup).

Try the other route too: copy the new kerning pairs from the PairAdjustmentTest lookup table using the icon at the top, then paste them into the PairAdjustmentLatin lookup using the same icon with that lookup selected. They can be pasted at the beginning. When the changes are accepted, FontCreator will sort the pairs and strip any duplicates.

Some fonts have no lowercase glyphs. It is easy enough to copy the 26 capital glyphs and paste them into the lowercase glyph code-points. However, there is a much better way.

Copy the lowercase glyphs: a-z

Select the Capital A

Paste Special, code-points only, add code-points

Add Mappings.png (5.5 KiB) Viewed 4150 times

Each glyph will now have two code-points, e.g. A will be both 65 and 97 decimal ... and Z will both 90 and 122 decimal.

The advantages of this method are: 1) the font will be smaller as it contains fewer points and contours; 2) maintaining the font is easier — if a glyph needs editing, you don't need to remember to copy and paste it again to the lowercase code-point.

In FontCreator 11, one can now add up to three programs or utilities to the Launch Externals submenu of the Tools menu. In the configure externals dialogue, browse to any program file on your hard drive to select the Executable file *.exe. Then, edit the title and type an ampersand before the desired access key, e.g. &Notepad to add Notepad to the submenu.

Launch Externals.png (7.91 KiB) Viewed 4003 times

It is also possible to add a particular file to the menu. For example, to add CompositeData.xml to the menu, browse to find the file as usual, but since the dialogue only shows executable Programs by default, type "*.xml" in the File name field, then select CompositeData.xml to add it to the submenu.

When the item is selected, Windows will launch whichever program you have associated with XML files. In my case, that is Jarte, a Wordpad clone that I use to edit CompositeData.xml.

I use a lot of extra text strings in the Preview.txt file as an aid for kerning. Jonne Haven added some more strings to my file for Uppercase-lowercase pairs. In Tools, Options, Advanced, Copy the Data files to the Data Folder, then Open User Data Folder to edit Preview.txt. Copy and paste this code to add the extra text strings.

I have added even more strings to Bhikkhu Pesala's original preview.txt (useful in kerning). Follow his instructions in the previous post to utilize this file which is placed inline as code. It includes kerning with common symbols with upper and lower case alphabets, and numbers inside parentheses, brackets, etc.

Another update to Bhikkhu Pesala's preview text file. Added is bite sized chunks of Capital letters and the letters they're often found with following. Also most of the arithmetic symbols used with numbers have been added. The ampersand sign with Capitals and Lowercase is included. Also capital Letters followed by lowercase letters has been completed to show all variations.

If there is no shortcut for a particular command, access keys are always an alternative. For example, to edit the selected glyphs, use Alt+L, N, E:

Another example, which I use frequently, is exporting all Fonts:

Export All Fonts.png (2.48 KiB) Viewed 177 times

Typically, I work on a set of four type styles, (eight if I am editing Kabala). First, I export all in OpenType format using the Access Keys, Alt+F (File menu), A, E. Then I delete all of the glyphs I don't wish to include in the smaller versions for the web, and use Alt+F, A, A to export all formats of all fonts. For Kabala, that would be 24 fonts: OTF, WOFF, and WOFF2 formats for each of the eight type styles.